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Treatment/Therapeutic Foster Parenting provides a crucial service to children dealing with extreme challenges. One parent tells us how this differs from traditional foster care, and details about training, services and therapy programs.

Continue reading Treatment Foster Care: One Parent's Story

I think something I have noticed more and more (and have not necessarily always thought of before!) is the number of children in the "system" that actually received successful adoption placement, but then were once again thrust into the system because they were not properly cared for, or the adoptive parents discovered they could not indeed care for the children they initially lovingly adopted. I can't even begin to imagine the emotional disruption this would cause in a child's life, particularly one that had been in the foster care system for a long time and then finally adopted, only to be pushed out once more into the world because it didn't "work out."

We hear a lot of stories of unfit foster parents. We hear about it when former foster children grow up (particularly those that never received permanent placement) and start to open up and tell the difficult and troubling stories of their experience in the foster care system. But rarely do we expect that when a child is adopted he/she will not "live happily ever after" (at least those of us that don't know adoption from the child's perspective or from the fearful first parent perspective). What happens in these cases, and how does it affect the children, as I would imagine it most certainly would, into adulthood and for the rest of their lives?